In March I opened a café at the top of the street, and in April it turned out that a café had opened at the bottom of the street too.
That sort of thing is not a coincidence. The street is short, the footfall is good, and there is an office on the corner that empties at noon. Two of us saw the same opportunity, and both of us assumed the other would fold.
She did not fold. In fact, hers got better than mine.
I do not enjoy writing that down, but it is true. The café at the bottom had a woman who put out a board at seven every morning with the day’s cake written on it by hand. Not a big thing. But people like it when somebody writes to them by hand.
So I started writing on my board by hand too. Then she began holding coffee tastings on Thursdays. So I put on music evenings on Fridays. Then she started writing regular customers’ names on the wall.
By then it was ridiculous, and we both knew it.
One morning in June the café at the bottom did not open.
At first I was glad. That is shameful, but true: for a week, every morning, I thought, at last. Then in the second week I started looking down the street, and I missed the board.
In the third week I went over.
The woman was sitting on a chair in the doorway with a piece of paper in her hand.
“We’re closed,” she said.
“I can see that. What happened?”
“The lease. The landlord doubled it. I can’t pay it.”
I sat down on the step, because I did not know what to say.
“You hate me,” she said.
“I don’t hate you.”
“You do. I hate you too. It was the best thing about my months, that somebody was doing the same thing as me, and better.”
That was honest, and it surprised me.
“What happens now?” I asked.
“I’ve taken a job somewhere else. I’ll be a waitress, somewhere I don’t get to decide anything.”
For a long time neither of us spoke. The street was empty, it was noon, and nobody came out of the office, because it was summer.
“I have a proposal,” I said.
“I don’t want a loan.”
“Not a loan. My café is small. One person fits, two don’t. But if you bring the cakes, then the two of us fit, and then you write the morning board.”
She looked at me as if she did not believe it.
“Why would you do that?”
“Because for four months I have thought every morning about how to beat you. And in four months that has not made better coffee. Your cake, on the other hand, has.”
In August we reopened. There is one name on the sign, because the lease is mine. But she writes the board every morning, and she bakes the cakes.
The first weeks of working together were not easy. Two people who have competed for four months cannot suddenly work as a team. On the first day we argued twice about the extractor fan.
Then one morning she said:
“Do you know what the worst part was?”
“What?”
“That every morning I saw your board, and it was better than mine. And then I went home and spent the whole evening thinking about what to write the next day.”
I laughed. I had been doing exactly the same.
In the autumn a customer asked whether we were sisters.
“No,” I said.
“What, then?”
I looked at the woman who was writing the board, and who noticed that I was looking, and smiled.
“Colleagues,” I said. “But it might be more than that.”
